Keep your Theist/Atheist arguments here

[facthunter]

How were records kept that long ago? Of course an earthquake originated rock slide could have caused local flooding. The "impression" is of a world wide flood so God could get rid of the bad GENES in the biomass he had created but then the earth was flat so it gets more conjectural. ( and pointless as fact).  Their god is too dumb to be any sort of real god. proving man created god in his own image  to explain the unknowns that Science has largely covered as we learned more mostly in the quite recent past. Nev

[onetrack]

Ahh - but God didn't create all the people on the Earth. Even the Bible tells us there were people on Earth before "God created Man in his own image". The people created by God are the Nations (or tribes) of Israel, and the Bible is simply the story of the Nations of the Israelite tribes. These tribes were 12 in number, and they comprise a pretty substantial number of the people on the Earth today.

 

There were obviously many types of people inhabiting the Earth over a very long period of time, before God decided to make a spot called Eden and put his initial race of people there.

Of course, once Adam and Eve disobeyed Gods instructions, they had to leave Eden and make their way in the wider world - and they interbred with the other races that were outside Eden.

 

Science should not be antagonistic towards a belief in God, it should only reinforce religious belief, as it proves the existence of a higher intelligence than Mankind can properly grasp.

The Laws of Physics and science in general, are not random, as it would be, if they evolved without any guiding higher power.

 

I'm no expert on ancient happenings or writings, religion is based on simple faith, and as such, cannot be compared to science where "hard evidence" must be found.

There is no "hard evidence" in a belief in God, you must simply believe that there is a God who has promised us a better life beyond this one, if we just simply accept that he exists.

 

But science continually uncovers ancient evidence that proves much of what was written in ancient times, did actually happen - even if the written information that has been left to us, is poor, inadequate, badly translated through a dozen different languages, and subject to the vagaries of personal translation.

As has been said - after interviewing two eyewitnesses to a car accident, it make one wonder about the accuracy of our recorded history, thanks to personal interpretations of what actually happened.

 

[old man emu]

Genesis is a very confusing Book of the Bible.

 

How do you interpret these verses from Genesis 6:1,2?

6:1 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 

6:2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose

 

Who were these "sons of God"?

 

And who were the "Nephilim"?

6:4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

 

The word Nephilim is loosely translated as giants in some Bibles but left untranslated in others. Some traditional Jewish explanations interpret them as fallen angels.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Noah was obviously a farmer who saved some of his livestock by building a big raft.  But as has been said, stories change with the retelling. The origins of clearly made-up details are mysterious for sure, but clearly no divine intervention was involved. More likely these details were added by ecclesiastical scribes who were trying to impress their masters in their quest to fleece donations from the uneducated public.

Why no divine intervention? cos the stories are so bad, that's why. The builder of the universe would have done better for sure.

 

[pmccarthy]

Nephilim were Neanderthals or maybe Denisovans. DNA proves they mated with the daughters of "humans".

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, pmccarthy said:

Nephilim were Neanderthals or maybe Denisovans. DNA proves they mated with the daughters of "humans".

Today is the first time I heard of Nephilim, as I'm not a Bible scholar. However, because secular science has independently proved the existence of a number of  Homo species close to H. sapiens and probably contemporary with H. sapiens. The mention of these other species in the Bible is probably an ancestral memory finally put into writing when that art was perfected. 

 

And then there are the giants of the Bible. A race of giants implies a hereditary element and the origins of some names may indicate the genetic pathway involved. The Hebrew word anaq may mean necklace (Proverbs 1:9), or possibly goitre. This could suggest hyperthyroidism, possibly due to underlying pituitary gland, or other endocrine, dysfunction.

 

Goliath, the Gittite, is the most well known giant in the Bible. He is described as ‘a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, whose height was six cubits and a span’. A literal interpretation of the verses suggests that his brother and three sons were also of giant stature. The name of Goliath's third son does not appear in the Bible. It was said that ‘he had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes’ (Samuel 21:20-21). Goliath's family tree is suggestive of a hereditary autosomal dominant pituitary gene, such as AIP2.

 

 Pituitary giants look impressive in terms of stature, but may not have speed and agility to match their perceived strength. David, having agility, particularly having declined the heavy set of armour that was offered to him, and being skilled at sling shots.

 

[Old Koreelah]

I’ve been enjoying the historic aspects of this discussion but nobody seems to have raised the elephant in the room; who built the massive stone structures that still exist over much of the world? Even today, scientists cannot explain how some of these edifices were constructed. They are powerful evidence of a past civilization with technology far in advance of ours. 

 

The most likely explanation is now emerging; a series of global events that destroyed much of humanity about 12,700 years ago.

Conventional scientists are a very conservative lot but many are starting to piece together the many cultural and geological clues. 

 

 

[old man emu]

Old K, 

I don't have any evidence to disprove the existence of past civilisation, however there are questions to be answered that archaeologists usually pose when trying to locate the facts behind legends.

 

First: all things must die. Skeletal material has provided many facts to write the story of the Homo spp. Why have no burial practices been found associated with the edifices we have found? An answer could be that the practice was to cremate the body and always scatter the ashes. But that seems to run counter to normal Homo spp practice since at least the Neanderthals, who went missing between 30 and 40,000  years ago.

 

Second: all human activity leaves waste. We learn a great deal about ancient Homo spp from the detritus left behind. The majority of this detritus are the objects of daily life, usually associated with all the activities of providing food. Why is none of this detritus found associated with the edifices? We have found the villages of the people who built the tombs of the Pharaohs.

 

Thirdly: all humans show artistic ability. From carvings in rock and paintings on cave walls, Homo spp has shown a delight in artistic expression. I haven't seen any pictures of spaces inside these edifices, but I would expect to see some form of decoration, including scenes of everyday life. 

 

Fourth: evidence of interbreeding. Most of these myths and legends include references to these beings taking Human spp females as breeding partners. Since the offspring of these unions were fertile, the genetics of the beings must have been extremely close to that of the Human spp. However, since we can find Neanderthal genes in modern humans, surely we can find some unusual genes in the modern human genome.

 

Fifth: coming from the sky. The frequency of the idea that ancient humans either mixed with, or observed beings who did not come from across the land or upon the seas leaves only one entry route - the sky. If these beings we present in the ancient past and did a lot of construction work, why haven't they come back? An you can't say the clandestine arrivals, mostly at night, would be necessary for an advances civilisation that was capable of at least inter-stellar travel. If we ignore worship of the Sun and Moon, why is it that some primitive peoples look to other stars as being the home of these sky beings?

[Old Koreelah]

53 minutes ago, old man emu said:

First: all things must die. Skeletal material has provided many facts to write the story of the Homo spp. Why have no burial practices been found associated with the edifices we have found?...

No idea, OME. Do we need to find graves, etc. to prove that people were actually there? 

 

53 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Second: all human activity leaves waste. ...

Why is none of this detritus found associated with the edifices? We have found the villages of the people who built the tombs of the Pharaohs.

Twelve thousand years is plenty of time for most evidence to return to dust.

No evidence of farming or settlement has been found associated with the ancient Gobekli Tepe monuments; convention archeologists are flummoxed by this massive site, but agree it’s at least 10,000 year old. 

 

The Younger Dryas events, of which more evidence is emerging, certainly would have wiped out any advanced civilization which might have existed at the time.

 

The massive ancient stone ruins found in many places may be tiny remnants of a much greater legacy that is yet to be discovered.

Even today, most of humanity’s greatest works are just above sea level. 

Whatever great civilizations existed prior to the disaster would have been built mostly along the coast.

 

That coastline is now miles out to sea.

 

53 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Thirdly: all humans show artistic ability. From carvings in rock and paintings on cave walls, Homo spp has shown a delight in artistic expression. I haven't seen any pictures of spaces inside these edifices, but I would expect to see some form of decoration, including scenes of everyday life. 

Good point. Were the builders not artistic or did they consider the construction of ageless edifices to be art enough?

53 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Fourth: evidence of interbreeding. Most of these myths and legends include references to these beings taking Human spp females as breeding partners...surely we can find some unusual genes in the modern human genome.

OME I am trying to be open-minded about the evidence, but I didn’t mention any extra-terrestrial intelligence to explain the many massive ancient engineering feats found around the world. 

 

53 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Fifth: coming from the sky. 

...why is it that some primitive peoples look to other stars as being the home of these sky beings?

There are some fascinating stories...

[pmccarthy]

Old K you have raised a subject that occupies me nearly every day and often lying awake at night. Yes I have watched all the videos and read the books! I assume it was all done by human beings, but:

 

How did they achieve a precision in stone surfaces that we can only achieve with the latest power tools? We know artistic perfection was possible with hand tools (Michelangelo's David etc) but how did they make sufaces flat and parallel and perpendicular to microns?

And the biggie - how did they move 1000 ton blocks across country? How did they lift them out of the quarry hole? How would we even move them today without modern machines?

 

I could go on....

 

My job as a mining engineer taught me about cutting and breaking and moving rock. I have no idea how they did it.

[old man emu]

2 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

I am trying to be open-minded about the evidence but I didn’t mention any extra-terrestrial intelligence

I agree with you, and I'm not going to get on a soap box and claim that might be an explanation. However, it is an theory that, until being proved impossible, has a right to be aired. In my eyes ETs can be assigned a score of possibility and a score for probability, the mathematical product of the two would determine the strenght of the theory.

 

2 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

Do we need to find graves, etc. to prove that people were actually there

If there was a civilisation, that implies a large population. Members of that population died. It would be an unusual human society that did not have funereal practices of some sort that resulted in some way of remembering the deceased persons if only by their immediate family. Skeletal remains have lasted form well before the rise of H sapiens, so one would expect remains of the members of early civilisations to still be about. Unless the funereal practice was to cremate and scatter, which is a possibility.

 

At the same time, large numbers of people will leave signs of habitation. We have evidence of temporary market sites from the Romano-British period which consists of little things that have been lost while attending the markets. A dying civilisation is not likely to invest time in clearing away signs of its existence by conducting a forensic-level cleansing.

 

2 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

Were the builders not artistic or did they consider the construction of ageless edifices to be art enough?

The high and mighty of the civilisation might think that, but the bloke on the bottom of the social heap is likely to ensure his immortality by graffiti.

[nomadpete]

OME and OK,

You are reasserting the same inexplicable unknowns.

 

Clearly there is some physical evidence of construction of stone things. I say 'things' because there is no discovered evidence of stone dwellings. My fascination is that there are big stone structures to be seen but no signs of human habitation (and all that involves). No, that doesn't prove that the aliens did it. But it only forces us to confront the question of how 'prinitives' managed to put incredible man-hours into precision stone masonry without leaving archaeological evidence of the makers existence.

No doubt in due course some earthly explanation will be found.

[Marty_d]

3 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

 

And the biggie - how did they move 1000 ton blocks across country? How did they lift them out of the quarry hole? How would we even move them today without modern machines?

I reckon it'd be amazing what thousands of slaves, oxen and possibly elephants (depending on which ancient structure you're talking about) could shift.  By the way the heaviest blocks in the Pyramids were "only" 80 tons.

We visited the Pont du Gard in France a couple of times - Roman aqueduct which descends only 1 inch over its length, which is a fall of 1 in 18,000.  I'd have a hard time doing that with a laser level.  The ancient engineers had brains the same size as ours and I reckon that given they didn't have Facebook or reality TV, they probably used them a hell of a lot more.

[old man emu]

The question that needs to be answered is: "When were these structures built?"

 

Luminescence dating (including thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence) is a type of dating methodology that measures the amount of light emitted from energy stored in certain rock types and derived soils to obtain an absolute date for a specific event that occurred in the past. Certain minerals (quartz, feldspar, and calcite), store energy from the sun at a known rate. This energy is lodged in the imperfect lattices of the mineral's crystals. OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) dating measures the last time an object was exposed to sunlight. Luminescence dating is good for between a few hundred to (at least) several hundred thousand years, making it much more useful than carbon dating.

 

The buried elements of standing walls of archaeological ruins have been dated using optically stimulated luminescence; the derived date provides the age of burial of the surface. In other words, the OSL date on a foundation wall of a building is the last time that foundation was exposed to light before being used as the initial layers in a building, and hence when the building was first built.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

All true fellas, and I agree with Marty’s point about the ancients’ lack of modern distractions limiting their skill development. Another point is their concept of time might have been quite different to ours; one craftsman might have spent a lifetime on some prefect stonework.

 

None of that explain how the massive blocks in Peru and elsewhere were fitted together with such precision...and why the most amazing engineering is on the bottom, presumably done eons before the later, less impressive work.

[old man emu]

Old K

I want to see if there are any luminescence data from those structures where the joins are so precise. Can you name some so I can do a search for results?

[Old Koreelah]

1 minute ago, old man emu said:

Old K

I want to see if there are any luminescence data from those structures where the joins are so precise. Can you name some so I can do a search for results?

OME I haven’t spent much time on the following sites, but they are a starting point.

 

https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/321233385896686981/

 

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/05/the-mystery-of-puma-punkus-precise.html

 

https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/evidence-cut-stone-compelling-argument-lost-high-technology-ancient-021545

 

 

[old man emu]

Examinations at Pumapunku site of the soil under the structure indicate that construction commenced about AD 536 .  A radiocarbon date was obtained from organic material from the lowermost and oldest layer of mound-fill forming the Pumapunku. This layer was deposited during the first of three construction epochs and dates the initial construction of the Pumapunku to AD 536–600). Since the radiocarbon date came from the lowermost and oldest layer of mound-fill underlying the andesite and sandstone stonework, the stonework must have been constructed sometime after AD 536–600. The excavation trenches show that the clay, sand, and gravel fill of the Pumapunku complex lie directly on the sterile middle Pleistocene sediments. These excavation trenches also demonstrated the lack of any pre-Andean Middle Horizon cultural deposits within the area of the Tiwanaku Site adjacent to the Pumapunku complex.

 

So, although the precision is amazing, the archaeology does not support the "lost civilisations" theory. 

[pmccarthy]

The precise joints are not such a challenge. You build the wall first flat on the ground, with the final exposed face down. Joints between blocks can be cut with a hammer and chisel to be millimetre perfect using a yardstick between blocks. First the sides, then assemble a course, then the tops and bottoms for the next course. Quality control can be perfect, no need to lift blocks in and out for trial fit.

once the wall is in place, trim and pillow the rough faces to give perfect joint lines.

[pmccarthy]

And why they used giant blocks all around the world is no mystery to me. If you don't have iron tools, each block must be exposed by pounding to powder a trench on the sides, ends, and underneath each block. All of the labour and cost of mining is in this activity. The cost rises exponentially as the blocks get smaller, until with blocks around one metre in size you are pounding far more stone than you are getting in blocks to build a wall. The labour involved in moving large blocks becomes trivial when you consider the labour in mining.

[Old Koreelah]

10 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

The precise joints are not such a challenge. You build the wall first flat on the ground, with the final exposed face down. Joints between blocks can be cut with a hammer and chisel to be millimetre perfect using a yardstick between blocks. First the sides, then assemble a course, then the tops and bottoms for the next course. Quality control can be perfect, no need to lift blocks in and out for trial fit.

once the wall is in place, trim and pillow the rough faces to give perfect joint lines.

PM you are not the first to come up with a method by which the ancients might have built their edifices. That doesn’t mean it’s feasible.

(One bloke suggested each of the Pyramids’ blocks was encased in a curved wooden frame, forming it into a neat cylinder. Presto: simply roll a couple of million of them up a ramp and your Pyramid is built in no time!)
 

Your clever method is in fact similar to one I have tried with my own stone walls, and it’s not quite as easy as you describe, even with the small rocks I can lift.

[Old Koreelah]

10 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

And why they used giant blocks all around the world is no mystery to me...

The cost rises exponentially as the blocks get smaller, until with blocks around one metre in size you are pounding far more stone than you are getting in blocks to build a wall.

You are quite right about this, PM. Stone walls I have built from small rocks have been tedious jobs compared to those where I had plenty of big ones.

[old man emu]

10 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

Joints between blocks can be cut with a hammer and chisel

That's true, but the Incas who built Pumapunku only had copper and bronze as metals. Near Puma Punku, Bolivia and at three additional sites in Peru and Bolivia, "portable" smelting kilns were used to manufacture I-beams in situ, to join large stone blocks during construction. Their chemical analysis shows 95.15% copper, 2.05% arsenic, 1.70% nickel, .84% silicon and .26% iron. It appears that they could also make bronze, which can be seen as an expensive substitute for the equally efficient stone.

[onetrack]

One Professor Ivan Watkins of the University of Texas, Austin, postulates that the Incas utilised the focussed rays of the Sun to cut their building stones so precisely.

Sounds a reasonable proposition to me.

In the late 1960's, the brother and SIL bought a stainless cooking bowl, and placed on the back seat of their Holden sedan with some paperwork thrown inside it.

The car was parked in the Summer sun for an hour or so. When they came back to it, they were stunned to find the paperwork smouldering, and the car full of smoke smell.

The dish had focussed the suns rays on the paperwork, and nearly set it on fire. A few minutes more, and the paperwork would've been well and truly alight.

 

The Incas knews about the power of focussing the rays of the Sun, they had a huge golden "Sun dish" in their temple.

The Spaniards were too dumb to even ask about its use, they cut it up for the gold, and killed all the Inca priests, who would've known all about how it was used.

 

http://enperublog.com/2006/11/12/inca-stone-masonry/

[old man emu]

Read about one therory here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2404inca.html

 

or watch the documentary. Go to 18:00 to get to the discussion of the joints.

 

https://archive.org/details/SecretsofLostEmpires/NOVA.S24E05.Secrets.of.Lost.Empires.Inca.1997.DVDRip.DD2.0.x264-astro.mkv